Month: September 2005

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Prayer — Why the Hell Not?

President Bush says:

“Throughout our history in times of testing, Americans have come together in prayer to heal and ask for strength for the tasks ahead. So I’ve declared Friday, September the 16th, as a National Day of Prayer and Remembrance. I ask that we pray — as Americans have always prayed in times of trial — with confidence in His purpose, with hope for a brighter future, and with the humility to ask God to keep us strong so that we can better serve our brothers and sisters in need.”

“Pray … with hope for a brighter future. …” That sounds pretty open-ended. Maybe we can pray for this guy and his whole entourage to go on vacation, permanently.

Interesting about Bush and national days of prayer — he’s proclaimed a whole bunch of them, starting the day after he was inaugurated in 2001; maybe he knew something. But we also have the National Day of Prayer the first week of May each year, National Days of Prayer and Remembrance to mark the 9/11 anniversary every year; and now a day of post-Katrina prayer. Good to see someone so willing to share his faith with the people; but I wonder whether he ought to declare some pre-emptive prayer days so that maybe we can skip some of the after-tragedy prayer.

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Just Add Warm Water

Apropos of recent discourse regarding the role of global warming and higher ocean temperatures in making recent hurricanes more destructive, a correspondent points to news of the recent publication of a paper in Nature (it’s a PDF file) that discusses this prospect. To cut to the chase, MIT scientist Kerry A. Emanuel says that though there’s little evidence that hurricanes are increasing in number due to the observed 0.5 degree C. rise in tropical ocean temperatures over the past few decades, a study of the power dissipated by tropical cyclones shows the storms are become more powerful and longer lasting and thus potentially far more destructive than before.

There’s math in the paper, which means it’s all a bunch of symbols and Greek letters to me. But Emanuel, who’s been doing advanced meteorological research since the ’70s, has put together something of a layperson’s resource explaining his work, “Anthropogenic Effects on Tropical Cyclone Activity” (anthropogenic means something you helped cause by driving down to the 7-Eleven instead of walking). The page includes a long essay I haven’t read yet, though I’m encouraged by the apparent lack of equations; but I did spot a genuine Great New Word there: paleotempestology. Emanuel’s credited (by one source) with coining it.

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Nate and Ophelia

Hurricane Maria is back to a tropical storm (and back to a hurricane) and headed into the central North Atlantic. But rather suddenly, it has lots of company:

—Tropical Storm Hurricane Nate, which merited its first public advisory Monday afternoon, may turn into a hurricane in the next couple of days (and pass close to Bermuda).

—Tropical Storm Ophelia, which developed quite quickly off the Florida coast (first public advisory Tuesday morning); Ophelia may wander up the Atlantic coast, or it may cross Florida into the Gulf of Mexico — the weather models disagree on where it will go.

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Trapped

Lieutenant Governor Mitch Landrieu appeared on “All Things Considered” tonight. He tried to make nice, like everybody else who might be implicated in the post-Katrina atrocity (amazing to see Bush and crew turn into statesmen so sudden-like: Please! Let’s not play the blame game!), but he made one point that I haven’t heard from other mainstream politicos: A lot of what happened with the people who couldn’t make it out of New Orleans is a much deeper issue than just finding buses and shelters for them, and one most of us have been content to more or less ignore:

“One of the things that troubled America so much was, you know, we didn’t really have to see the poor, because they were dispersed. And everybody got a pretty good glimpse of what all a lot of poor people look like standing together, and I think it made America very uncomfortable. We looked in the mirror and we didn’t like what we saw. Now people are going to talk a lot about, as you have already started, who’s got the blame for not moving people out of where they are. There’s a much bigger question, because poor people get trapped, but they get trapped in poor education, they get trapped without transportation, they get trapped without technology, they get trapped without the things that many other people have. And that trap puts them in front of the Convention Center and in the Superdome. And so the country has to ask itself, what are we going to do relating to poor people, and what public policies are we going to put in place now that they’re standing right in front of us and we can’t ignore it any more?”

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Maria, the Hurricane

We have a new hurricane, Maria, headed for the mid-Atlantic (Tropical Storm Lee has already come and gone).

The next name up for grabs is Nate (followed by Ophelia, Philippe, Rita, Stan, Tammy, Vince, and Wilma). No Q, U, Y, X, or Z — so no hurricane Queequeg. Or Xavier. Or Yves or Zeus, either. The only explanation I can find is that the naming authority, the World Meteorological Organization, feels there’s not a sufficient stock of names for those letters to designate all the storms that need to be accounted for. (Side note: As with Camille and Andrew and other monster storms, Katrina will be withdrawn from the list of potential names.)

How far through the list will we get? On August 2, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration revised its hurricane season outlook. In May, the agency predicted 12 to 15 tropical storms for the season, with seven to nine becoming hurricanes, and three to five becoming major hurricanes. The August update increased the estimate to 18 to 21 tropical storms, nine to 11 hurricanes, and five to seven major hurricanes.

What happens if we get through storm 21 (Wilma) and another one appears? An investigation is under way.

(If you must know more, see the WMO’s seven-page fact sheet — a PDF file — on tropical cyclone names.)

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Selective Service

Just filling out a student aid application (late!) for our son, Tom, who is about to go off to the University of Oregon. One of the questions: “Is the student male? (Most male students must register with the Selective Service to get federal aid.)”

OK: I’m not going to take on the subject of Selective Service right now. But: Just the guys have to sign up? Come on. There’s talk about reinstating the draft, something I have mixed feelings about. But one of the conditions I think would be basic if we come to that is conscripting both women and men. (Among other conditions: allow for alternative national service — such as undergoing disaster relief training so that we’d have a ready, nonmilitary force to respond to situations such as we have in the hurricane zone right now).

But even short of a draft, girls ought to be registered at their 18th birthdays the same as the boys.

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September 3, 1921

In 1921, September 3 fell on a Saturday. On that day:

A son, Stephen Daniel, is born to the Rev. Sjur and Otilia (Sieverson) Brekke in Warren, Minnesota, the seat of Marshall County. I’d love to know what the Rev. Brekke’s sermon was the next day to his congregation at Bethlehem Lutheran Church in Alvarado, 11 miles west of Warren.

Elsewhere:

Henry Bellmon, future governor and U.S. senator from Oklahoma, is born near Tonkawa, Oklahoma.

St. Johnsville, New York, police officer David Bennett Hill is struck by a hit-and-run driver and killed.

Photographer Ruth Orkin born in Boston.

The Cincinnati Reds beat the visiting Chicago Cubs, 4-0, at Crosley Field (so what’s new?). The White Sox fall to the St. Louis Browns, 5-0, at Comiskey Park. The game marks the final appearance of Browns pitcher Joe DeBerry, 24, just a year after making his big-league debut.

Florence M. Foos, 19, marries Fred D. Erni in Bison, Kansas. They had been married nearly 65 years when she died on April 3, 1986.

The population of the world: Roughly 1.86 billion (today: 6.46 billion). Of the United States: 105 million (today: 297 million). Of Marshall County, Minnesota: 19,443 (2000 census: 10,155).

Film star Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle drives from Los Angeles to San Francisco to party with friends. By the end of the Labor Day weekend, he’d be a suspect in a murder case — a scandal that all but ended his career.

The September 3 Saturday Evening Post features an article called “The Uses of Calamity” by journalist and early press critic Will Irwin (I haven’t found the text).

In Binghamton, New York, Erma Mae Bryan, 24, marries Herman Otto Wunderlich, 42, who had refused to wed until his mother had passed away.

In the September 3 issue of the British medical journal, The Lancet, Dr. R.W. Burkitt notes that powdered rhubarb has proven effective in treating acute dysentery.

Robert Staughton Lynd marries Helen Merrill. Their son, Staughton Lynd, becomes a noted conscientious objector.

In the 16th Davis Cup tennis tournament, the United States defeats Japan, 5-0.

Ernest Hemingway married Hadley Richardson (it didn’t last).

The Arkansas City (Kansas) Daily Traveler reports: “John Peters, for fifteen years a resident of the little town of Ashton, in Sumner county, west of here, has located in Arkansas City and will in the future make his home in the best city in Kansas. … He has purchased the grocery store of A. L. Bendure, located at 426 North A Street, and he will take charge of the business there next Monday morning.”

Lightning strikes the Lower Coverdale, New Brunswick, Methodist Church.

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Louisiana 1927

NPR just played Aaron Neville’s beautiful cover of the Randy Newman song (lyrics as they appear on the original (1974) cover of Newman’s album “Good Old Boys,” which Kate pulled out of her stack of old records while we debated whether the words I found online were correct. Oh, for the record: She was right.):

“What has happened down here is the winds have changed

Clouds roll in from the north and it starts to rain

Rained real hard and it rained for a real long time

Six feet of water in the streets of Evangeline

“The river rose all day

The river rose all night

Some people got lost in the flood

Some people got away alright

The river has busted through clear down to Plaquemines

Six feet of water in the streets of Evangeline

“Louisiana, Louisiana

They’re tryin’ to wash us away

They’re tryin’ to wash us away

Louisiana, Louisiana

They’re tryin’ to wash us away

They’re tryin’ to wash us away

“President Coolidge come down in a railroad train

With a little fat man with a note-pad in his hand

The President say, ‘Little fat man isn’t it a shame what the river has done

to this poor cracker’s land’

“Louisiana, Louisiana

They’re tryin’ to wash us away

They’re tryin’ to wash us away

Louisiana, Louisiana

They’re tryin’ to wash us away

They’re tryin’ to wash us away

They’re tryin’ to wash us away

They’re tryin’ to wash us away”

(I note that Neville says “farmer’s” instead of “cracker’s.”)

A couple days ago, CNN published a little somewhat drippy backgrounder on the song and the events it’s based on. The occasion for NPR playing “Louisiana” was an interview with John Barry, author of “Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America.” The Wikipedia has the bare-bones facts about the disaster, which was a big topic during the 1993 flood.

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‘Rebellion of the Talking Heads’

Sunday night — a long, long time ago in the Hurricane Katrina era — I offered an obligatory scoff for the predictably breathless TV news coverage of the storm’s imminent landfall. I suggested that there might be a better way — turn coverage of such events over to the people who make reality TV. But it turns out that all it took for the TV news people to get past their trademark melodrama and cheap showmanship was to subject them to a genuine crisis for several days, with no hope of relief, right in the middle of the United States of America. Slate’s Jack Shafer had a great writeup Friday on how those covering the hurricane aftermath for CNN, MSNBC, NBC, and yes, even NPR, finally got to the point this week that they actually started demanding answers from the pols and bureaucrats they usually let smile and say nothing.

A former deputy chief of FEMA told Knight Ridder Newspapers yesterday (Sept. 1) that there “are two kinds of levees—the ones that breached and the ones that will be breached.” A similar aphorism applies to broadcasters: They come in two varieties, the ones that have gone stark, raving mad on air and the ones who will.

In the last couple of days, many of the broadcasters reporting from the bowl-shaped toxic waste dump that was once the city of New Orleans have stopped playing the role of wind-swept wet men facing down a big storm to become public advocates for the poor, the displaced, the starving, the dying, and the dead.

It’s about friggin’ time.